The Councils as the Manifestation of the Church Unity
It was only natural that the bishops, who, as Cyprian emphasized, share in the one episcopate, should meet together in a council to discuss their common problems. Orthodoxy has always attached great importance to the place of councils in the life of the Church. It believes that the council is the chief organ whereby God has chosen to guide His people, and it regards the Catholic Church as essentially a conciliar Church. (Indeed, in Russian the same adjective soborry has the double sense of ‘catholic’ and ‘conciliar’, while the corresponding noun, sob-or, means both ‘church’ and ‘council’.) In the Church there is neither dictatorship nor individualism, but harmony and unanimity; its members remain free but not isolated, for they are united in love, in faith, and in sacramental communion. In a council, this idea of harmony and free unanimity can be seen worked out in practice. In a true council no single member arbitrarily imposes his wil1 upon the rest, but each consults with the others, and in this way they all freely achieve a ‘common mind’. A council is a living embodiment of the essential nature of the Church.
The first council in the Church’s history is described in Acts xv. Attended by the Apostles, it met at Jerusalem to decide how far Gentile converts should be subject to the Law of Moses. The Apostles, when they finally reached their decision, spoke in terms which in other circumstances might appear presumptuous: ‘It seemed right to the Holy Spirit and to us …’ (Acts xv, 28 Later councils have ventured to speak with the same confidence An isolated individual may well hesitate to say, ‘It seemed right to the Holy Spirit and to me’; but when gathered in council, the members of the Church can together claim an authority which individually none of them possesses.
The Council of Jerusalem, assembling as it did the leaders of the entire Church, was an exceptional gathering, for which there is no parallel until the Council of Nicaea in 325. But by Cyprian’s time it had already become usual to hold local councils, attended by all the bishops in a particular civil province of the Roman Empire. A local council of this type normally met in the provincial capital, under the presidency of the bishop of the capital, who was given the title Metropolitan. As the third century proceeded, councils widened in scope and began to include bishops not from one but from several civil provinces. These larger gatherings tended to assemble in the chief cities of the Empire, such as Alexandria or Antioch; and so it came about that the bishops of certain great cities began to acquire an importance above the provincial Metropolitans. But for the time being nothing was decided about the precise status of these great sees. Nor during the third century itself did this continual expansion of councils reach its logical conclusion: as yet (apart from the Apostolic Council) there had only been local councils, of lesser or greater extent, but no ‘general’ council, formed of bishops from the whole Christian world, and claiming to speak in the name of the whole Church.